The Alleged Farm

The Alleged Farm We grow a wide array of crops for direct sale to local consumers. We focus on producing healthy, tasty food, preserving our farm and helping our community.

Our farm is located in the Town of Easton, in the rolling hills of southern Washington County, New York. We farm on fields under continuous cultivation since 1788 and take our stewardship of the land seriously. For us, that means a commitment to sustainable practices such as crop rotation, controlled grazing, minimal tillage and the use of cover crops and compost in order to promote and maintain t

he health of the earth. We are also committed to growing tasty and healthy crops. We believe that fresh local produce tastes better and that crops grown without the use of synthetic fertilizer and pesticide are better for you and for everything that lives on our farm. We do everything we can—from choosing varieties to choosing when to harvest a crop—to ensure that our customers receive the best possible produce. If you want to try some of our produce—and we grow everything from artichokes to zucchini--you can join our CSA or visit our stand at the Glens Falls farmers' market. Individuals and businesses can also contact the farm to arrange purchases. Thomas Christenfeld
The Alleged Farmer

09/27/2022

The Alleged Farm News
22 September, 2022

This week’s share: Bok choi, Celery, Garlic, Lettuce mix, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Rutabaga, Sage, Delicata squash, Tomatoes
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I recognize that I am in many ways unlike the native farmers of Easton. And it’s not just the lack of cows and the size of my tractors, or that I don’t know how to weld and will never be considered for membership in the Elks club. I grew up in a different place and a different culture. I was more likely to get a Ph.D. than a chainsaw.

Despite that, I tend to think that my farmer neighbors and I share certain personality traits that nudged us towards agriculture. Stubbornness. Not wanting to rely on others to do things for us, even if they are better at the task. A preference for tangible results at the end of the day. No real interest in keeping clean. Not a team player.

Well, I at least am not a team player. It’s not so much the playing part. The team aspect doesn’t really seem to agree with me. Not because I am a hermit. I don’t want to take off for the Alaskan wildness, build a hut by an unnamed lake, huddle alone by my stove, happily unreachable and forgotten. I have no objection to intermittent interactions with other people, and I am not so intractable that I cannot recognize the huge advantages of having help on the farm. Nor do I ascribe to the cult of individualism, the fantasy that each of us alone deserves the credit for our accomplishments. We are inextricably enmeshed in accumulated knowledge, traits and beliefs.

But there’s something about teams that makes me uneasy. They seem a little too much like a frat or a cult. I feel you ought to be able to get in a boat with eight other people and row well enough without the forced emotional bonding, the need to be jokey pals. If you turn out to like the other guys, then by all means hang out and enjoy the banter. If you don’t, you can still get to practice on time, follow the stroke, and pull as hard as you can. The boat will go faster because you all do the work, not because you act like friends.

I am well aware that this is a somewhat Puritan view, a slightly grim prioritizing of work over fun, responsibility over friendship. I am not suggesting that people should follow my lead, or that being this way makes me a better person. It just makes me who I am. And amongst other things I am a farmer.

But I would guess most of the farmers around here were eager participants in various teams throughout their school year, and continue to feel a strong bond to their teammates and to the current versions of those teams. Indeed, I think to some extent they regard being a local and a farmer as belonging on a team. It’s somehow something more than just proximity and cows. Not, to be clear, that it means they all like one another. But they are teammates, which helps to explain why they take it oddly personally when someone quits farming.

I would guess this is not the only point on which we have less in common than I like to imagine. In fact, the whole premise that my neighbors have been led to farming by their character traits is probably somewhat misbegotten. I found my way to farming despite my upbringing. They were born into farming. They do it to carry on the family legacy, because it is what they know, because it is what the people they know know. If we are somewhat alike in our outlook and behavior, it’s more likely that farming has imposed somewhat similar ways of being on us than that those ways of have imposed farming on us. Maybe I am going native. Well, maybe a little anyway. I still have no desire to milk cows. I am happy to hire my skilled neighbor to do any welding I need. And I am not

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Vegetable notes: Obviously we are not done with summer vegetables. We may have tomatoes and peppers through the middle of October, and there’s a new flush of eggplants that might get to a useable size before it’s too cold. But fall is coming. And this week it turns up in the form of a Delicata squash and a rutabaga.

I would recommend roasting the squash whole in a fairly hot oven until it is soft. Then you can scoop out the flesh, mix in salt, pepper, a little nutmeg and sage, maybe some butter. Or cut the squash in half, slice thinly, toss with oil, maple syrup, paprika, cumin, coriander, fenugreek, salt and pepper, and roast in a single layer in a hot oven until it softens and caramelizes.

As for the rutabaga, surprisingly it may be best raw. You can boil and mash it, roast it, put chunks of it in soup, add it to a potato gratin. But you can also shred it and make a slaw with some onion, maybe a little celery, and a creamy, slightly sweet dressing.

09/27/2022

The Alleged Farm News
15 September, 2022

This week’s share: Basil, Beans, Beet greens, Fennel, Lettuce, Onions, Peppers, Hot peppers, Potatoes, Shallots, Tomatillos, Tomatoes
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While picking potatoes the other day I noticed that along with the potatoes I had also plowed up a mouse nest. A neat little cup of dry grass was lying in the dirt with tiny hairless baby mice spilling out of it, and an agitated mouse parent next to it. As I leant over to look the adult rushed at me—for a moment I thought it meant to attack me—and shot between my legs, disappearing into the adjacent potato row. I picked up the nest, scooped up the babies as gently as I could, and placed the nest and babies out of harm’s way. Well, further harm. I didn’t check on them again, but I suspect I had already done a fair amount of harm. I would like to think the parents, or at least parent (I don’t know how mouse couples handle child rearing), returned when it seemed safe and managed to salvage the situation. But it seemed fairly dire. Moving the babies was probably an empty gesture of contrition.

Why I felt contrite I cannot really explain. Yes, I plowed up the nest, but incidentally in the normal course of my work. I cannot get to the potatoes without digging (I trust it comes as no surprise that potatoes grow underground), and leaving the potatoes in the ground to avoid disturbing any rodents would be an odd choice. If leaving rodents unmolested were the goal, I should skip planting the potatoes in the first place. Except that the potatoes provide a food source for rodents. Which is one of a number of reasons I shouldn’t feel bad about reducing the rodent population, intentionally or accidentally.

I recognize that lives are interconnected, and that removing rodents from the farm would no doubt have some unforeseen and unwelcome consequences. We have all sorts of rodents here, and I suppose some of them must do things that help me. I just haven’t noticed this behavior. I have, however, noticed the seedling trays wrecked, the crops eaten, the fruit trees girdled, the wires chewed, the insulation destroyed. The most positive things I can say about our rodent population is that it provides food for kestrels, and I like kestrels. It would be a shame if they had to restrict their diet to bugs and small birds. It would get a bit boring for them.

You would think that as a farmer I would, if not rejoice at the destruction of a mouse nest, at least feel no qualms about it. But apparently I am a bit of a softie. Though I knew that already. I plow around Killdeer nests, mow around spider webs, make sure to move the toads in the greenhouses out of the way before I hoe.

Not that I am like a Jain. In fact, most of the creatures around here probably think of me as a crude killer. I may not specifically be after them—except in a few cases. But I bash around the place with my equipment, flipping dirt and smashing down plants, driving wherever I want as if I were in a mall parking lot. I am clumsy and heedless and self-centered. If they accidentally dug up my nest I doubt they would choose to move me out of harm’s way. All they would say in my favor is that my behavior creates opportunities. Without aiming to, I provide an abundance of tasty food, create useful habitats, flush out prey, keep a few predators at bay. I suppose that’s why they put up with me. The occasional acts of mercy, while they demonstrate that I am not just bent on doing harm, cannot atone for my sins. It’s just a bit of silly human sentimentality, and I doubt it misled the mice about my true nature for a moment.

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Vegetable notes: You have Fenway potatoes this week. The name, I suppose, is related to the color, though I wouldn’t have said the Red Sox logo is potato red. Perhaps it is also a little joke about the number of people of Irish ancestry in the Boston area and their alleged fondness for potatoes. Or maybe Dr. Fenway led the breeding program that developed this variety. For all I know, they just picked the name out of a hat. I cannot tell you much about it’s eating quality either because I have never grown this variety before, and I haven’t eaten any yet. The catalog mentioned that it is good on pizza, which is a very specific recommendation for how to use it, and I am not even sure what it means. I don’t know what quality in a potato makes it suitable as a pizza topping. Perhaps one of you will make a potato pizza and let me know. Otherwise, I believe they are probably good boiled or mashed, and just about any potato is good roasted with onions and a generous amount of salt and pepper. Or you could make a spicy potato and bean salad, and maybe put in a little fennel.

09/27/2022

The Alleged Farm News
8 September, 2022

This week’s share: Beans, Carrots, Escarole, Garlic, Lettuce, Onions, Parsley, Peppers, Hot peppers, Tomatoes
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I find myself sometimes wondering about the social life of insects. I don’t mean their communal work life, how bees parcel out tasks and even body shapes in order to run an efficient hive, or how leaf cutter ants divvy up the various jobs involved in gathering foliage and turning it into a giant fungus factory. I don’t deny that’s fascinating stuff, well worth contemplating, and maybe even a source of wonder—though there is something undeniably patronizing and ignorant about our ability to be surprised again and again by the sophisticated natural systems we not only live along side of, but are part of. I would guess that if one watched Planet Earth with a roomful of assorted creatures they would enjoy the productions values as much as we do, but be nonplussed by us needing David Attenborough to tell us that things are interconnected. Further, unnecessary evidence that as intelligent and terrifying as we are, we have failed to notice a lot of obvious stuff around us because we are too busy admiring ourselves.

But, as I said, that’s not what I am wondering about. When I talk of the social life of insects what I really mean is, do they have friends? It is a question shaped in part, no doubt, by the Ant and Bee books I read as a child. For those who missed them (raised on English books, I am never quite sure what’s known in this country), they are a series of learn to read books about the two very British insects. Most memorably, in one they travel around the world searching for Bee’s lost umbrella.

I know that bees, unlike Bee, don’t have umbrellas—and that ants, unlike Ant, don’t wear bowler hats. And I understand that ants and bees are unlikely to have to sort of friendship humans have—or wish they had. The sort of friendship where you put aside everything else and circumnavigate the globe to help your pal find something meaningful to him.

The flies in our kitchen are mostly just buzzing around looking for food and s*x, and trying to avoid the spiders lurking in the corners, not hoping to run into a friend and have a good chat or borrow something or seek solace or swap dirty jokes, though I imagine if a fly told a joke it would be a dirty one. It seems like a pretty simple, brief and largely instinctual existence that leaves no room for meaningful relationships. That’s probably true. But look down dispassionately from a tall building at the streets of a city and you would see much the same thing. It would be hard from that distance to discern much in the way of friendship or sympathy or generosity. That does not mean it’s not happening, but absent the normal cues we would just be guessing at its existence, seeing it where we want to see it.

Maybe we also don’t see it where we don’t want to see it. Life’s a bit more complicated if those two beetles crossing paths by your feet are actually exchanging greetings, remarking on the lovely spell of weather and sending their best to the family. That sort of behavior would put beetles in a rather different class of being for most of us, and one that most of us would probably prefer to keep beetle-free. It’s so much simpler when an insect is just a slender, inexplicable life force away from being a robot.

Considering the possibility of insect friendship might be nothing more than sentimental human twaddle, another failure to appreciate other beings as they are in a misguided effort to understand them in our terms. Maybe a more accurate version of Around the World with Ant and Bee would tell how two insects got stuck together in a shipping crate and carried on with their separate lives—the ant being ant-like, the bee bee-like—because that’s what they do, and a long journey is not going to change that. Maybe, though, we are overstating the case for human friendship, which after all has a lot to do with proximity and common cause and self-interest and just filling time, all things that insects seem to grasp about as well as we do. Maybe insects just lack the ability to romanticize friendship. They have friends, but they don’t go on about it. I am not betting on it, but I am not ruling it out. I will keep watching them to see if I see any hints of amicability—or a tiny umbrella.

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Vegetable notes: You have a couple of Jalapenos (blunt, dark green) and a couple of other small hot peppers randomly selected from amongst the ones we grow. The orange ones are very hot; the slender pointy yellow and red ones less so, but still potent; anything else is about the equivalent of a Jalapeno or milder. As with all hot peppers, if you want to reduce the power, be sure to remove all the seeds and white pith. Also, the tip is milder, the stem end hotter. You could use them in a salsa, or make a spicy bean salad, or puree them with garlic, parsley, roasted sweet peppers, a little vinegar or lemon juice, maybe a few walnuts, the make a sauce. Or you could make a hot pepper simple syrup, maybe with cilantro or mint or basil, mix it with lime juice and Mexcal, and serve over lots of ice.

09/04/2022

The Alleged Farm News
1 September, 2022

This week’s share: Lemon basil, Husk cherries, Leeks, Lettuce, Candy onions, Peppers, Newmex and Poblano hot peppers, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Zucchini
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I always look forward to Fair week. Not so much because of the Fair these days. There was a time. The first few years we lived here we were avid fairgoers. It was the most concentrated exposure to local culture, plus funnel cakes. We would go through all the cow barns, admire the full array of poultry, watch the out of field tractor pull, check out the farm diorama contest, and, of course, chat with the various acquaintances we met about the weather that year and how the crops were doing.

At some point, though, the thrill began to wane. Maybe once you have lived in a diary farming community long enough, cows don’t seem quite as interesting. Maybe we got just local enough not to need a massive infusion of the culture. Maybe it got too crowded. Whatever the cause, we stopped going multiple times a year, and then at some point stopped going at all. In the end, all we were left with was a slight nostalgia for the feeling of excitement about the Fair.

But I continued all summer to look forward to Fair week, because that’s when the hot weather finally breaks and you get the respite of cool nights. It’s the first hints of fall, the first hint that the workload will ease up and that every now and then you can just stand in a field and enjoy the scenery without a thousand pressing tasks nagging you to get moving.

At least, that’s what should happen. This year the hot weather decided to hang on a bit longer. I suppose that shouldn’t surprise me. The first frost now comes about a week later than it used to. My observations are not precisely scientific, I know, but I get the sense that things are changing, that the reliable aspects of farming aren’t quite so reliable.

Not that there are so many reliable aspects to farming. We don’t work in laboratory conditions. Not those of who still farm outside, anyway. There’s a general pattern, of course. It gets colder in winter, warmer in summer. For the moment, anyway. But the details change from year to year, and the details matter. If I knew when it would rain, for instance, life would be easier. Just having a sense of whether the spring will be warm or cold, dry or wet would help. But none of that’s accurately predictable until it’s too late to matter much.

So we guess what to do based on any patterns we can discern. For instance, we set planting dates based on first and last frosts. Put the peppers out too early and you could lose them. Put the last zucchini out too late and you could lose them too. We also rely on that shift to cooler weather at Fair time. Many of our fall crops need those conditions. You might think holding off transplanting for a week wouldn’t make much of a difference. But seedlings don’t like waiting, and plants are keenly aware of how many minutes of daylight they get. Last year our penultimate planting of brassicas thrived, and the last, transplanted five days later, went out too late and was just winter feed for the deer.

Having the warm weather last through Fair week or the frost come later is not necessarily a bad thing. The peppers have been notably laggardly this year, and certainly benefitted from a little more tropical heat. An extra frost-free week extends the season for all the summer crops. But not knowing when to count on the shift to fall temperatures or that first frost increases uncertainty. While I have become somewhat accustomed to uncertainty, I have never in all my years of farming wished for more of it. It seems entirely possible, though, that Fair week will now just serve as a reminder of what was: of that newcomer excitement about immersing ourselves in the local culture and a time when we had a basic sense of what the weather had in store for us.

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Vegetable notes: the husk cherries (like tiny tomatillos) have little to do with cherries. They are not even the same size or color, let alone related botanically or by taste. Think of them, instead as small tropical tomatoes with enough modesty to cover themselves in public. Which suggests, I know, that they take off the husks in private. If so, I have never seen it. But then I suppose I wouldn’t. As for what to do with a husk cherry, other than denuding it, I would suggest you just eat it.

The hot peppers (The Newmex is long and light green; the poblano (a fresh Ancho), dark green) are not overwhelmingly hot. At least on average. Sometimes you get a hotter one, sometimes one that has barely any heat. They are excellent roasted and peeled. You could put them in a salsa or a taco or a potato salad or with grilled zucchini and onions. Or you could roast and peel the sweet peppers too, and toss them with grilled leeks, lemon basil, lemon juice and oil, and maybe a few capers.

09/04/2022

The Alleged Farm News
25 August, 2022

This week’s share: Basil, Eggplant, Edamame, Endive, Garlic, Lettuce, Candy onions, Hot peppers, Thyme, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes
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I spend a fair amount of time every winter choosing tomato varieties. There are hundreds and hundreds to choose from, each one presumably offering some positive trait or it would not have made it into a seed catalog. At least, I have never come across a tomato in a catalog described as insipid, offputtingly ugly, a meager producer, disease prone or just a waste of space in your garden. I am sure such tomatoes have existed. Tomatoes will cross pollinate given the chance (the chance existing if a different tomato in the vicinity flowers at the same time and there’s a bee or a slight breeze), and they are fairly easy seeds to save, so people have grown god knows how many difference varieties over the years. Most of them have probably not been worth hanging onto and were never seen again. The varieties people have gone to the trouble of maintaining are the varieties worth maintaining because they look cool or produce an abundant crop or shrug off fungal diseases or taste notably good. Or, if you get really lucky, all of the above.

I don’t know that many tomatoes achieve all of the above. Most standard modern varieties have a kind of general competence. Professional plant breeders have worked pretty diligently to amalgamate as many positive traits as possible. But they have bred varieties that emphasize specific traits because farmers have a range of needs and challenges. Southern farmers using conventional methods to grow for wholesale markets are not looking for the same things in a tomato that an organic farmer selling direct to consumers in the northeast wants.

Even a single farmer might need different strengths depending on when and where he’s planting. I grow inderterminate (that is, the vines just keep growing and growing) varieties in the greenhouse, determinate varieties outside, and extra disease resistant, short season varieties for the late planting. Within those parameters, I look for varieties with notably good flavor, a little durability (it doesn’t do me much good to have a stupendously delicious tomato so fragile it cracks when I pick it) and decent disease resistance (I don’t spray a lot, and only use organic fungicides) in a range of colors and that aren’t too small or too large. That still leaves me with a lot of choices.

I have a core list of varieties I plant year after year (if I can get the seed; sometimes even good varieties disappear from the catalogs), and a longer list of ones I have tried and won’t plant again. And then each year I try some new (to me) varieties that meet some need—a reliable pink slicer to replace Pink Beauty, for instance—or that just catch my fancy—such as Mila, a kind of gourd-shaped bright orange Russian variety with an allegedly perfect balance of sweetness and acidity.

I know, of course, that none of the varieties will live up to the catalog hype because nothing ever does. If our possessions were even half as good as they sound in the sales pitch, we would be a much more content bunch. And there’s generally some defect that, for some reason, has gone unmentioned, or been recast as an asset. A variety with an unpleasantly thick skin might be touted for its resistance to cracking or its high percentage of fruit with marketable appearance.

But the main reason the tomatoes fall short of their catalog description is that tomatoes generally don’t grow in ideal conditions. In addition to the embellishments and omissions, the description is of the tomato variety at its best. It is telling you about its potential when everything goes right. Whenever that is. It’s not useless information, but it would be nice to know, say, how often over a ten year span that variety came close to its potential, and what it was like the rest of the time. When I started farming I tried a variety called Cherokee Purple tomatoes and it was tasty as any tomato I have ever had. In large part because of that, I continue to grow a few every year. But at this point only a few because in the 27 years ensuing years it has sometimes been good—though never as good as that first year—more often disappointing, and occasionally more or less a total failure.

With tomatoes, nurture matters as least as much as nature. Not that really coddling a variety will turn a cherry tomato into a beefsteak or jazz up a red one with yellow stripes. But stick a puny seedling in poor soil and leave it to fend for itself, and no amount of breeding will save it. To get the most out of a tomato, out of any tomato, you have to give a lot all through its life. It needs a good start, a good home, food, water, medicine, protection from predators, space to grow, support as it ages. And because it lives in an imperfect world and is always fragile in certain ways, it needs a healthy dose of luck. The most robust a tomato is the more resilient it will be. But a minute of wind-driven hail might do more damage that any tomato can take.

If I have gotten better at growing tomatoes over the years, in part I have become more sensible about variety selection. I am willing to sacrifice a little wow for a steady supply. Mostly, though, I have raised enough tomatoes at this point that I have become a somewhat more adept guardian. I have a lot of crops to look after, so they don’t always get everything they want. But they don’t need everything they want. You just have to know what’s necessary and provide it when necessary. And, most importantly, you have to make sure they don’t have too much to drink

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Vegetable notes: The edamame (little, fuzzy green pods) should be boiled in very salty water for a few minutes until the beans are slightly tender, but not soft. I think the best thing to do with them is just snack on them, but you could shell them and use them in a salad or a stir fry.

If you are looking for something else to do with eggplant, and you happen to have a little ground meat and some time, here’s an idea. Halve the eggplants, score the flesh and brush with olive oil. Bake at high heat until the flesh has browned on top and softened. Scoop most of it out, leaving enough so the eggplant halves hold their shape. Meanwhile, sauté meat with onions, garlic, slat and pepper, and maybe some hot peppers, add tomato paste, vinegar, cumin, coriander, a little cinnamon, sumac, the eggplant flesh, and enough water or stock to make the mixture moist but not soupy. Cook on low about ten minutes, add some currant or dried cranberries (and pine nuts if you like them). Taste, and adjust the seasoning if necessary. Fill the eggplant shells, and bake, covered, for about forty minutes. Serve with yogurt and chopped herbs.

08/25/2022

The Alleged Farm News
18 August, 2022

This week’s share: Thai basil, Carrots, Chard, Cucumbers, Escarole, Candy onions, Parsley, Shallots, Tomatillos, Tomatoes, Cherry tomatoes, Zucchini
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Our three remaining hen are adventurous eaters. They wander around the barnyard all day, chatting and looking for food. They will peck at just about anything: rotten tomatoes, pebbles, shoes, anything shiny. In their minds—if that is the right word for a chicken’s mental capacity—they are still velociraptors, and everything is prey. They have a way of eyeing us that suggests we are not excluded from that category. They just haven’t figured out the right plan of attack yet.

In the meantime, we serve a purpose. We give them treats. Toss almost anything in their direction and they will check it out, give it at least an exploratory peck. If they are lucky, it will be popcorn or a fat zucchini that Sunni has been kind enough to cut in half so they can get at the seeds easily. And they know that if they come to the kitchen door and announce their presence, Liz might give them breadcrumbs. They spend a lot of time by the kitchen door, and Liz spends a lot of time cutting up stale bread for them. She is sufficiently well trained now that she gets a little anxious if she doesn’t have something to offer the hens.

One thing they don’t seem particularly keen to eat these days is chicken food. I still put out a little food when I open their coop in the morning (at least it keeps the rats and sparrows fed). Often, though, the hens have already headed off to the barn before I finish pouring it into the feeder. They might stop in during the day for a snack, but they have decided they can get better things to eat elsewhere—especially if Liz and Sunni are around.

There are so many better things to eat, but the best of all, they clearly agree, is whatever one of the other hens is eating. When one of us gives them food and the fastest hen gets hold of something, the other hens rush over to her, ignoring the available food, in order to get a piece of what she has. They squabble over it, the one who has it in her beak taking evasive action while the others try to grab it from her. Eventually they settle down, notice all the other unclaimed food. But even when they have sorted themselves out and everyone’s pecking away at their own treat, they are still eyeing one another. If anyone makes a move you see the others’ heads pop up, and often they will go back to fighting over a single piece of popcorn or whatever it is you gave them. And they’ll do this no matter what you give them, even over things they decide they don’t want.

I suppose it could be explained as competition for limited resources. Chickens evolved in the jungle, where treats and treat suppliers where presumably in shorter supply. I suppose whenever one perceptive jungle fowl found a food source it was easier for the others to go after it than find their own. It’s better to be a bully than a forager. And now they are just set in their ways, even in the presence of more than enough food for every hen (Sunni can be quite generous with the popcorn).

It’s also possible, though, that they are like my father in a Chinese restaurant. He always scans the other tables to see what’s there. And no matter what we order, he’s always sure the other diners have something better. Quite possibly something not even on the menu we saw, maybe from the secret menu. Or maybe only available to those who know to ask. We could be eating the best Chinese food we have ever had, and he would still be convinced that everyone else in the restaurant was having something better. Since he wasn’t raised in a jungle, he won’t actually go to the other tables and try to take the food. But he cannot keeping an eye on the other dinersAnd every dish that emerges from the kitchen causes another pang of anxiety that he might be missing out.

It’s some deep, complicated impulse, at once selfish and social. It’s hard to be your own hen in a flock, and hard to be a hen on your own. So you stick together—for safety, for company, for something to do all day, because three beaks are better than one—and then squabble over a zucchini even when there’s more than enough for everyone, because that’s what you do when you live other chickens.

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Vegetable notes: The shallots (the elongated reddish oniony things) are a variety called Crème Brulee. I don’t know why. I cannot explain most vegetable variety names. In this case, though, it does make me think a shallot crème brulee might be good. Steep some garlic and herbs in the milk before making the custard. Maybe add a little parmesan. Pour it over a layer of caramelized shallot. Sprinkle a little salt on the crunchy burnt sugar to finish it. If that seems like too much effort, you could just put the shallot, finely sliced, in a salad dressing (make it a few hours ahead so the shallots mellow and the flavor permeates the dressing) or use them with the potatoes (and maybe some zucchini) in a frittata, or add them to some sautéed chard, or put them in a tomato salad, or fry them until crisp and sprinkle them and the basil on a Thai salad.

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209 Cooke Hollow Road
Easton, NY
12185

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+15186929065

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